Two days. 562 new passing tests.

For some unknown reason I woke up at 3am on Saturday morning and couldn't get back to sleep. So, I decided I might as well use the time for some productive Rakudo hacking.

I decided to start by reviewing the spectest suite a bit. In the past couple of days I've noticed that although we've been increasing the number of spectests that Rakudo passes, we didn't seem to be shrinking the number of tests that are in the spectest suite but don't attempt to run (the grey area in the graphs). So, I decided to review the test files that we don't run, instead of the ones we do. I also reviewed the RT queue for patches to apply.

By 23:59 on Sunday, we had 526 more passing tests than we started with on Saturday. In fact, in the past two weeks Rakudo has increased its count of passing spectests by over 1,000. We're now at 5,790 total passing tests.

Here's some of what was accomplished this weekend:

recognize the difference between array and hash subscripting.
align with a change to S02 that now uses \c for decimal character encoding
added the .kv method to Pair, to enable the pair.t spectests
recognize more unicode codepoints (though still not all) as alphabetic
enable the various unicode bracketing characters for quotes
added the unicode versions of the infix hyperops we added last week
added the p5=> "fat comma" operator
cleaned up the readline method on IO
recognize radix conversions in strings
add +Inf, -Inf, and NaN processing
add some workarounds so that Complex numbers work again (they broke with mmd)
implement the use of the "whatever star" in list and array slices

Getting the "whatever star" to work was a nice surprise -- thunking the arguments to postcircumfix:<[ ]> turned out to be quite a bit easier than I had expected. Rakudo can now do things like @a[*-10 .. *-1] to get the last ten elements of an array.

Over the weekend Cory Spencer submitted several incredibly useful patches to fix array initialization in my() lists and properly refactor many of the list builtins. He has two more patches in the queue that I plan to review and likely apply tomorrow morning.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with the progress Rakudo contributors have made over the past couple of weeks. In addition to getting new features to work, there's also been a lot of internal refactoring and cleanup that will make things more efficient and help with the next phases of development. So, although I'm not sure that we'll be able to repeat the past couple of weeks, things still look very good for ongoing improvements to Rakudo.

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